Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Note on romanization; 1. Introduction: what is the Great Wall of China?; Part I. First Considerations: 2. Early Chinese walls; 3. Strategic origins of Chinese walls; Part II. The Making of the Great Wall: 4. Geography and strategy: the importance of the Ordos; 5. Security without walls: early Ming strategy and its collapse; 6. Toward a new strategy: the Ordos crisis and the first walls; 7. Politics and military policy at the turn of the sixteenth century; 8. The second debate over the Ordos; 9. The heyday of wall-building; Part III. The Significance of Wall-Building: 10. The Great Wall and foreign policy: the problem of compromise; 11. The Wall acquires new meanings; Notes; Bibliography; Chinese and Japanese materials; Western materials; Glossary; Index.

Promotional Information

This is the first full scholarly study of the Great Wall of China to appear in any language and, drawing both on primary sources and on the latest archaeology, it challenges many deeply held ideas about Chinese history.

Reviews

"China's modern rulers have nurtured the popular myth that the Great Wall of China is a single, continuous barrier built in the third century B.C. and surviving to the present. Actually, as Princeton historian Waldron demonstrates in a landmark study, most of what we today call the Great Wall was built during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644)...one of the few books that change our basic assumptions about China." Publishers Weekly

"Historical writing at its best, a brilliant and very readable account." The Asia Society

"In this absorbing, tour de force account of the cult of the Wall, Waldron propels the reader along a fascinating journey of the frontier of China anad into the factionalized inner circles of dynastic politics to capture the tension between the syncretic and conservative approaches to foreign policy....an exquisitely crafted chronicle of China's ironic approach of using 'walls' as a way of embracing the larger world." Asian Thought and Society

"This book has a wisdom, a patience, and a confidence about it that enrich Waldron's wonderful knack for writing history." History Book Club

"This should be the standard work for some time to come, and may be assigned to graduate students and senior history majors as a model of historical scholarship. Having also pubished interpretive essays on 'warlordism' and 'federalism, ' Waldron is rapidly building a reputation for taking fresh looks at concepts Chinese history specialists have taken for granted." Roger B. Jeans, The China Quarterly

"Waldron makes a valuable contribution to our historical understanding of China." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies